'Still a big believer': Philip Meyer reflects on three decades at Microsoft

After close to 35 years at Microsoft, Philip Meyer has started his own business – Catalyst 345 - with the mission of trying to help partners find their edge with the tech giant’s suite of products.

Meyer’s long history as a partner strategist for Microsoft came to an end in July due to taking redundancy, but for over three decades he was right amongst it all - beginning in 1990 when Windows 3 was shiny and new, and just one year after Australia’s first internet connection.

In the mid-1990s, Meyer's job was to make phone calls to the new internet service providers popping up and convincing them to replace the free copies of Netscape Navigator they were doling out to customers with Internet Explorer CDs instead.

And Meyer was good at it.

“Within four years, we basically went to 95% market share with Internet Explorer,” he told techpartner.news.

Meyer referenced that while this and other methods of distribution were successful, they also landed the company in hot water with the US Department of Justice for unlawfully leveraging its operating system monopoly to force out other browser providers.

Ultimately, Microsoft avoided being broken up on appeal, but it was a moment that set the stage for the modern tech giants; the findings echoed in the recent cases that ordered the breakup of Google, which it is set to appeal.

Making a SPLA-sh

Another major piece of Meyer’s history at the company was his key role in the development of Microsoft’s Services Provider License Agreement (SPLA).

The SPLA is the framework for companies selling services built with Microsoft products.

It was established around the year 2000 and, in many ways, defined the broader IT industry’s approach.

Meyer said he was one of the three people on the committee for designing the SPLA, with the other two based in the US.

“Microsoft said, ‘We'd really like to think about this idea of a subscription model for software’, because everything has been you pay up front and Microsoft get a chunk of change for that, and then you'd renew it after three years, or you'd let it sit for seven years on the old version,” he explained.

“We need[ed] something in this world of active server pages and web hosters.”

While the SPLA he helped design has been superseded in the 25 years since, Microsoft has not been shy about making changes to licensing and over the last several years, has been using those changes to encourage partners to move toward its cloud service provider model.

Since then, Meyer spent most of his time at the forefront of how Microsoft Australia interacted with partners as the partner strategy technologist for hosting and cloud.

Time for a holiday

Meyer said that at the start of July, he had a meeting where he was told the company was changing, in part due to artificial intelligence, and that he could either go and find another job or take redundancy.

The timing probably couldn’t have been better.

“I'd already booked to go on a holiday 10 days from that date, and I wasn't about to cancel a long-planned holiday, so I only had a very short window to find a job,” he said.

“I did try and find a job, but most of the jobs were deeply technical, which I wasn't, or heavy sales-focused, which I wasn't. I'm more of a strategist, more of a general-purpose ‘Swiss army knife’.”

He explained that he ended up taking redundancy on the day of his wedding anniversary, which he was celebrating in Brussels.

Meyer said being on holiday in the face of such a drastic change was exactly what he needed, and encouraged anyone facing redundancy who has some spare cash to do the same.

“It doesn't have to be anything exotic - just a drive up or down the coast [will do] - but get away from it all, let your mind be focused on doing something other than work and give your mind a chance to process it,” he said.

“So, I processed it and decided I wasn't finished with work. I have a big passion for the partner ecosystem so I thought, what can I do?”

Catalyst 345

Meyer said after 34.5 years with Microsoft, the redundancy was his catalyst for change and so when it came time to name his company, which is concerned with being that catalyst for partners, he landed on ‘Catalyst 345’.

While the company is comprised of just Meyer at this stage, he said the business will be focused on three key areas: workshops, speaking engagements and panels.

In the workshops, he said he wants to work with partners and their clients to help them better understand Microsoft products.

“It could be secure AI, it could be migration to the cloud, it could be about M365 productivity - all those sorts of things or the whole gamut,” he told techpartner.news.

Meyer is positioning himself as an independent operator who can either help a partner make the most of changes happening in tech or support a partner in helping their own client through those changes.

For Meyer, there is no bigger change than modern AI, which he also sees as offering some of the biggest opportunities.

He gave the example of partners taking on software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors with modern AI-based solutions.

“The biggest opportunity … in the age of AI, with things like Copilot Studio and having a common AI and common security as the foundation, is for (partners) to go and build purpose-built, custom Copilot solutions for their particular customer, understand their business and build a process based on Copilot Studio which meets their business needs,” he said.

“They can still harvest data out of their old systems, but the SaaS application [now] becomes a database.”

Despite how his time at Microsoft ended, Meyer says he is “still a big believer” in the company.

"It’s hard to get 34.5 years at Microsoft out of my system, and I don’t intend to,” he said.